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Comment by monochromatic | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble thinking of a less googleable name for a programming language.

I think that award goes to "S" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)]. If you add a "-lang" suffix (the traditional fix for a poorly-named programming language), you just end up with "slang".

Plus it's already taken. http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/

The SQL-style query language called "ENGLISH" used for the Pick operating system by Microdata Corporation.

One conjecture I read was the name was chosen so sales could say "your users can query the database in ENGLISH".

How about C?

Or a language with meta characters in it, such as C++?

Obviously, these two languages are popular now so they are the first hit but you can bet in the early days of the web, it was a bit different.

I understand your point, though, whenever I create a project, I do my best to pick a unique name for that very reason, but overall, history tends to indicate that such decision will not prevent a good product from becoming popular.

Google didn't exist when C and C++ became popular, so naturally it had no effect on their popularity. But you can't say that new languages don't suffer from those problems, because newer languages so rarely reach the level of popularity of C/C++, even when they have easy to search names.

Not altogether unsurprisingly, for me "none programming language" works currently on Google. And while I may be jumping to conclusions, I suspect that the intersection of programmers to whom none appeals and those who think "programming language" is just too much to type into the Google it box to gain access to a tool is probably pretty low. In my experience, there are places where unique search terms really matter and those where it doesn't and developer tools tend to fall into the latter.

There are a lot of them, e.g: B, C, D, E, R, Go, Io.

Also my favorites Verbose(Java has nothing on it) and Intolerant("A language that wipes the user's hard drive if an error occurs").

Go I will give you, and maybe Io. But I actually think "None" is worse than any of your other examples.

C, D, R, and Go are the first links presented in Google search results searching simply on their name.

And do you know why?

1. Because Google already knows that you're a hacker (based on your search history and other info it has on you).

2. Because those are old and famous in their respective communities (ergo page rank and visibility).

3. Because there is actually content for them out there (so it actually has something to present).

Go uses golang for almost anything search-related on the internet.

I did a college project in Icon. You can find all the major docs and manuals by Googling "icon programming language," but any more specific Google queries tend to return results for things like changing the favicon of a website or changing a desktop icon in Windows.

It is, incidentally, a pretty neat programming language. It seems like it had a big influence on Python.

I've always had troubles with Factor. The suggestion is convert searches to "factorlang" but this has middling success.

Swift: http://swift-lang.org/main/

Hint: Not Apple's.

Not programming languages, but Apple's "Pages" and "Numbers" are pretty lousy when it comes to googleablility.

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